Elevators from Hell

An elevator with two floors and waiting — that's not science fiction, that's hell. Elevators from Hell from 1992 took the most boring place imaginable and decided to turn it into a game.

It's a puzzle-platformer where you move through various elevator level stages, collect items, and solve simple logic puzzles. The game runs on PC and DOS, and the graphics are well below average even for the time — characters look like pixelated candy without soul, graphical elements are monochromatic blocks devoid of personality. The "hell" setting sounds intriguing, but in reality you're just in an ordinary elevator shaft with gray walls and dull doodles.

Playing is repetitive and slow. You move between floors, jump over obstacles that are never difficult — just tedious. The controls aren't terrible, but there's practically no dynamism whatsoever. Levels are designed to annoy you more than entertain you. No story, no motivation, nothing to push you forward. I keep waiting for a surprise, but instead I'm watching the character's animation cycle as it slowly moves three pixels to the right.

In the nineties, there were games in their own genre that knew what they were doing — Lemmings, The Lost Vikings, even cheap titles had at least some innovation or pure playfulness. Elevators from Hell, however, occupies the most depressing point between tedium and forgettability. The graphics and level design aren't the targets of criticism — it's simply an insensitive, almost scorched earth without the creator's interest.

Today there's practically no reason to play it in a browser or emulator, unless you're a collector who must go through games at any cost. It's an artifact from a time when PC was flooded with things of almost any nature. It's not the worst game I've ever seen — just the least interesting.